Phoneme element examples

Symptoms

Provide samples around the usage of the VXML tag phoneme.

Environment

Prophecy <= 9 Prophecy >=10

Resolution

Depending on the version of Prophecy the behavior for the phoneme tag is different.

Prophecy <= 9

Here the phoneme tag is unfortunately not supported. A useful workaround may be employing the sub element:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<vxml version="2.1">
    <form>
        <block>   
        	<prompt>
        		this message brough to you by the
        		<sub alias="World Wide Web Consortium">W3C</sub>
        	</prompt>
         </block>
    </form>
</vxml>

Prophecy >=10

With Prophecy 10 the phoneme tag has been implemented. One possible usage is:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<vxml version="2.1">
    <form>
        <block>
            <prompt>
                Let's go to <phoneme alphabet="x-cmu" ph="P ER S AH L AA P AH L IH S">timbuktu.</phoneme>

                Would you rather go to <phoneme alphabet="x-cmu" ph="P ER0 S AH2 L AA1 P AH0 L IH0 S">katmandu</phoneme>?
            </prompt>
        </block>
    </form>
</vxml>

Please see the two different diction inside the phoneme ph attribute.
The first one just makes the TTS say the phonemes.
The second one contains a lexical stress following the vowels:
0 - no special stress or inflection 1 - primary stress 2 - secondary stress Some TTS engines might fail on phonemes without lexical stress so to be on the safe side add the stress data to your phonemes.

Please see also:

• Voxeo VXML Documentation
  • Phoneme Element:
    http://www.vxml.org/phoneme.htm
  • Sub Element:
    http://www.vxml.org/sub.htm
• W3C SSML Specification:
  http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis/#S2.1.5
• The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary:
  http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict